That Eureka moment ... the Greeks' goal is disputed in a scene from Monty Python philosophers' football.

It's perhaps the second most famous football moment in English history. In the 90th-minute of play at Munich's Olympic Stadium, in September 1972, a commentator with cut-glass BBC English is going ballistic. "Socrates has scored!" cries Michael Palin. "The Greeks are going mad! Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant, via the categorical imperative, is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside."

Not quite as pithy as Ken Wolstenholme's "they think it's all over", but that was the joke behind Monty Python's philosophers' football match, in which for 89 minutes the players wander around too lost in thought to actually kick the ball. Until, that is, Archimedes has his "Eureka!" moment. "The clash of two opposites is the whole point," former Python Terry Jones tells me. "You can't think about football too much, you just have to do it."

Now Python, philosophy and football are set to come together once more to pay tribute to the original sketch. For the sake of the ticket-buying public, let's hope the philosophers who boot up in north London on 9 May are a little more energetic than the originals. I will be playing centre-back for the Greeks, along with some frighteningly young-looking academics, comedians Mark Steel and Tony Hawks, and the historian Bettany Hughes. A similar mix of academics and celebrities, including Arthur Smith, are playing for the Germans. But while our side is being led by the former England manager Graham Taylor, the Germans have got lion-maned philosopher AC Grayling as their coach. That's us doomed, then.

The serious point of the match is to promote the teaching of philosophy in schools as the "fourth R" – reasoning. Those looking for a serious point in the original, however, are probably as guilty of thinking too much as the hapless players.

The sketch was filmed in Germany while making the second of two episodes of Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus. "John and Eric [Idle], as the two keenest football players, had a great time setting up the goal-scoring," recalls Jones. Idle was clearly proud of their handiwork: "I remember Cleesey crosses from the right and I scored a great diving header," he says in the Pythons' autobiography. "I keep telling Gary Lineker, and he keeps promising he's going to show it in the best goals of the last millennium because it's not a bad header." Jones remembers "running out on to the pitch as Karl Marx was a great feeling of empowerment", but does not see any deep significance in the choice of football. The only reason it was funnier than some of the alternatives, he says, is that "football is a team activity which philosophy, as a general rule, isn't".

Some have tried to link philosophy and football before. Ardent England fan Mark Perryman has been successfully selling his philosophy Football T-Shirts for years, featuring quotes such as: "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football" by real-life goalkeeper Albert Camus.

But, as the Python oeuvre attests, the combination of philosophy and comedy goes far deeper. Jones recalls John Cleese as being the most interested in the subject, and he is on record as saying that comedy and deep thought can go hand in hand. "You and I could talk about the meaning of life, or education, or marriage," Cleese once told a journalist, "and we could be laughing a lot, and it doesn't mean that what we're talking about isn't serious."

At the risk of this all getting silly, I'd go so far as to say that Python represents a coherent, Anglo-Saxon take on existentialism. French thinkers such as Camus and Sartre recognised the absurdity of life, but it took the English Pythons to show that the right response is to laugh at it.

Of course, that's not to say they set out to be philosophers. "We certainly weren't trying to preach, or even teach," says Jones. "We were just trying to do incongruous things, I guess." That sounds very much like what Bertrand Russell described as the aim of philosophy: "To start with something so obvious as to not be worth mentioning, and to end up with something so absurd that no one will believe it" – a likely description, I fear, of my performance on 9 May.